The task force had done a pretty thorough background check on Bannister, given that they’d heard of him just twenty-four hours ago. They’d sent us copies of his criminal record, his employment and residence history, even his credit report. His DMV records showed that he had a valid Washington driver’s license and that he owned a 2005 dark blue Ford Ranger pickup with no lienholder. In addition to this, Kenny was able to grab his cell phone records from the number Nicki provided.
Suddenly, Toni startled me. “I think you can put that away.”
“Why’s that?” I looked at her. “You need a break?” We alternated on the binoculars.
“Nope. I’m good. But look who’s walking down the sidewalk.”
“No shit?” I looked where she was pointing, closing the lid on the laptop as I did. Sure enough, Josh Bannister was on the other side of the street, maybe 150 feet away, walking purposefully toward the front entrance of his apartment building plain as day. I glanced at Toni—she was watching him through a high-quality video camera with a Morovision gen-3 night vision scope that I’d bought used on eBay for a song.
“You sure it’s him?”
“You bet,” she said, without looking away. “Turn on the monitor.”
I flipped a switch, and a small flat-screen video monitor mounted to the wall of the van sprung to life. I watched as the man continued walking in our direction.
“Zoom in,” I said. “Close-up.”
Toni rotated the zoom control on the camera and centered the man’s face in the frame. Even lit in the eerie green light from the night-vision lens, Josh Bannister’s features were clear.
I studied the face. “Damn, that’s him, alright. You’re recording this, right?”
“Of course.”
“Good. I’ll call Ron.” I looked at the time: it was 7:45 p.m. as I dialed Ron’s number.
He picked up, and I said, “Dude, you’ll never guess who’s walking up to his apartment right now, as we speak.”
“You got to be kidding. I’ll be damned—wonders never cease.” He paused for a couple of seconds, then he said, “Okay. Just watch him—do not move in. I’ll call Yoshi, and we’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Got it? Don’t spook him, whatever you do.”
“Got it.”
“Just wait for us!” he repeated right before he hung up. I set the phone down and looked back outside.
There was a set of four or five steps leading from the sidewalk up to a decorative entryway of the red-brick apartment building. When he reached the steps, Bannister paused and looked around nervously. Apparently satisfied that he’d not been noticed, he turned, bounded up the stairs and went inside.
“Got all that?” I asked.
“Sure did.”
“Good.” I leaned back in my chair and watched the monitor. “So now we hurry up and wait.”
We didn’t get to wait very long. Five minutes after Bannister entered, the building’s front door opened, and he walked right back out. This time, he was carrying a small backpack. He flipped up the collar on his coat as he walked down the steps and, without pausing or looking around, he turned left and started walking away from us back up the street in the direction from which we’d first seen him walk.
“Shit,” I said. “Short trip.”
Bannister walked at a steady pace, continuing up the street away from us.
“We’re going to have to follow him,” Toni said. “You ready?”
She was right. So far, we’d been lucky. Bannister had walked out of nowhere right into our laps. We hadn’t even had to do anything but sit there. But in my experience, good luck has a bad habit of leveling itself out, and I doubted if we’d be that lucky twice. “Okay.” I hopped up into the driver’s seat. “You’re right. Call Ron and let him know what’s going on. Here—” I handed her my cell phone, “just hit redial.”
Toni got through to Ron and started briefing him while I watched Bannister continue walking away. I let him open up a bit of separation between us—maybe fifty yards or so—before I started the van and turned my headlights on. I wanted to be stealthy, but not too stealthy; the last thing I wanted to happen was for him to turn around and spot a van following him with no lights on. That would freak anybody out. If he saw us, he needed to think we were just any old normal vehicle. I allowed him to put a little more distance between us, then I pulled out and slowly started forward.
Up ahead, Bannister constantly scanned all around himself as he walked. He definitely must have seen our van, but he kept walking. “Toni, this guy’s jumpy as hell.” I paused, considering our next action. “Listen, if he takes off up one of these alleys, I’m going to hop out and follow him. You take the van, swing around and try to catch him on the other side.”
“Got it.”
The words were no sooner out of her mouth than Bannister made his move. He turned and darted into an alleyway.
“There he goes!” I punched the accelerator and pointed the van down the center of the street. “You ready?”
“Go!”
I reached the alley and hit the brakes hard, causing the van to slide to a stop and everything in the back to fall to the floor. “Shit!” I muttered, as I jumped out.
I turned and took off in pursuit toward the alley. A couple seconds later, Toni burned rubber as she pulled away.
I figured Bannister probably had a ten-second head start on me—maybe 100 or 150 feet, something like that. The distance, combined with the fact that the alley was nearly pitch-black, made it so that I couldn’t see him up ahead, but I could hear him—his footsteps pounding on the rough alley pavement somewhere up ahead, splashing through puddles as he ran for all he was worth. I followed.
The alley spanned an entire block—maybe four hundred yards long. It alternated between pavement and gravel sections. The buildings were pushed up close on both sides, making the alley feel like a little canyon in the dark. Farther ahead, the alley jogged to the left and prevented me from seeing clear through to the lights of the street on the other side—the street where Toni would soon seal off the alley exit. I kept running anyway. I’m a distance runner, not a sprinter. Still, I practice sprinting often enough that compared to most people, I’m fast. I splashed through several large puddles and almost tripped over a pile of trash, but I caught my balance, lowered my head, and kept pushing.
After what seemed like minutes but was actually something like twenty seconds or so of running all out in the near pitch-black, I pulled up and listened. I was a little surprised that I couldn’t see Bannister yet ahead in the darkness. I must have covered close to two hundred yards, but there was no sign of him. Could he have been that much faster than I’d imagined?
I strained, listening intently. Suddenly, there! I heard footsteps ahead in the dark, and I took off in pursuit. I could just barely make out the dimensions of the buildings silhouetted in the pale moonlight of the nighttime Seattle sky, so I was able to at least stay more or less in the center of the alley and avoid running full speed into one of the cars parked alongside the alley or, worse, into a greasy dumpster. Another ten seconds or so, and the jog in the alley loomed up ahead of me. I slowed down and listened. Nothing again.
This was bizarre. I started to get an uneasy feeling, a sort of sixth-sense kind of deal like I used to get from time to time when we were on patrol in Iraq. I mean, here I was running all out after a guy who might be a murderer in a blind alley in near total darkness. I had no idea where the guy was, whether he was armed, or what his intentions were. I had a weapon, of course, but I had no backup, excepting Toni somewhere at the other end of the alley. The thought occurred to me that this might not be the smartest thing I’d ever done. I strained to hear something that might give Bannister away. There! This time, I definitely heard footsteps up ahead, around the corner of the jog.
I listened for a moment, trying to determine how far away the steps were, but then I noticed something strange. The footsteps seemed to be getting louder! They weren’t running away anymore—they were coming bac
k toward me!
I pulled my sidearm and ducked behind a dumpster thirty feet from the corner. Could it be that because I hadn’t caught him, Bannister had assumed that I hadn’t bothered to follow and now he was doubling back? Or had he decided enough is enough, and now’s the time to have it out? This made it easier—I’d just wait and nab him as he came past.
I steadied my breathing and listened. Sure enough, cautious footsteps continued to approach. I waited quietly. Ten seconds later when I heard footsteps come around the jog in the alley, I jumped out, my .45 leveled at a shadowy figure fifteen feet away.
“Stop!” I yelled.
“Danny! It’s me!” Suddenly, she hit me with a dazzlingly bright light that caused me to shield my eyes and look down. When I did, I noticed the little red laser dot doing its little dance right over my heart.
I immediately lowered my weapon at the same time she lowered hers. “Toni! Son of a bitch!” My heart was racing as I looked around. “Turn that fuckin’ light off before he shoots us,” I said. She did. I was completely blinded now, my night vision shot for the next half hour or so. Still, I looked back down the alley. “Where the hell did he go?”
She scanned the area with me. “I don’t know. I don’t think he made it through. I parked the van to block off the other end of the alley. He didn’t come out that way unless he somehow beat me to it.”
I shook my head. “No way—he couldn’t have. He couldn’t possibly be that fast.”
She thought for a second as I scanned the area. “Do you think you could have run right past him?”
As if to answer, a car engine started two hundred yards behind me, from the direction where I’d entered the alley. We spun around and watched as a car that had been parked alongside a building suddenly peeled out and took off the other way.
“Is that a Ford Ranger pickup?” Toni asked.
I was still seeing stars and I couldn’t make it out, but somehow I knew. “No doubt.”
“Well, I guess that answers the question then.” She holstered her weapon.
“Shit!” I yelled. My voice echoed off the buildings. There was no way we could get back to wherever it was that Toni had left the van and still find Bannister. He’d be long gone by then. “Son of a bitch!” I said again. “He must have ducked between the cars and let me run right past him. Damn! I could have sworn I heard his footsteps.” I holstered my sidearm.
“Well, you probably heard his for a little bit of the way, then he stopped and you heard mine.”
“Damn. Ron’s going to be pissed.”
“Look at the bright side,” she said cheerfully.
“What?”
“At least we didn’t shoot each other.”
Later, Toni and I were home in bed just ready to turn the lights off when the phone rang. Toni picked it up and looked at the caller ID. “It’s Ron,” she said.
Earlier, when I’d called Ron and let him know that Bannister had gotten away, he’d actually seemed more resigned than upset, as if he’d somehow expected that there would be problems. I asked about this and he said, “Relax. It’s not you guys. It’s the nature of this case. Nothing’s gone right. Why should tonight be any different?” I told him he had a bad attitude. He told me to go fuck myself in a friendly kind of way.
When we were done lamenting our bad luck, we went through our options. Ron sent an e mail of Bannister’s driver’s license picture to the half-dozen uniformed officers that congregated on the scene. They could be on the lookout later while on patrol in the off chance that they bumped into Bannister. We talked for a while longer, but we’d hung up with no resolution. I wonder what he wanted now.
“You’ll never guess who I just heard from,” he said when I answered. He sounded excited.
“Who?”
“None other than Joshua Bannister himself.”
I laughed. “Sure. Of course.”
“Seems he got a call from his big brother. Guess our little talk this morning worked after all—the bastard does have a conscience. Anyway, little brother claims he didn’t do it. Sounded all panicky. Says he wants to come in and talk.”
“Really? He just wants to turn himself in?”
“Yep. He sounded scared shitless. Said some crazy bastard’s killing his friends and now they’re after him—chased him down the street and into an alley tonight not more than two hours ago. Bannister says he barely got away with his life.”
I laughed. “You tell him the crazy bastard was me?”
Ron laughed. “Hell no. I figured what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. Help keep him honest. He says he wants to come in. If he’s scared someone’s after him, it might help keep him from changing his mind.”
“He say anything about Judie Lawton?”
“No, we didn’t get into it. Just that he didn’t do it, and he wants to come in. So I said okay. He’s definitely scared—squirrelly as hell, and he didn’t even want to stay on the phone. Probably watched too many movies—thought someone was tracing the call or something.”
“So when’s he coming in?”
“Well, that’s the funny thing. He said he’d be downtown in my office tomorrow night at seven.”
“Tomorrow night at seven? That’s pretty strange. What’s wrong with right now? The guy got an appointment in the morning he can’t break?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, he’s scared shitless. He said he was safe and holed up now, and he didn’t want to move tonight and that he also didn’t want to move in the daylight tomorrow—he wanted to wait until it was dark tomorrow night. I told him we’d come get him, but he declined. Man’s jumpy.”
Toni was listening in. Hearing this, she immediately shook her head and made her “bullshit” face. She squints her eyes and raises one side of her mouth when her bullshit detector goes off.
“And you believed him?”
“It’s not like I have much of a choice, right? Guy says he’s going to turn himself in tomorrow, what am I gonna do? Tell him ‘hell no! It’s now or never!’? Limited-time offer? We ain’t actually in the driver’s seat here, you know? Maybe he figures he’ll end up getting sent up for a while and he wants to get this thing straightened out—car, money, that kind of stuff. That’d take a few hours, right?”
Toni shook her head no.
I nodded yes. “Yeah, I suppose.”
“Anyway, as long as he comes in, right?”
“True enough.”
“So we’ll see you guys then?”
“If you want us there, we wouldn’t miss it.” We said good-bye, and I hung up and turned to Toni. “Well?”
“Call me a skeptic.”
“You’re always skeptical.”
She turned to me just before she flipped the light off. “I’m a realist.”
Chapter 15
“WELL, IF YOU ASK ME, THE man sounds guilty as sin,” Cecilia said. “He should be strung up from the highest tree around.” We were having breakfast with her and Oliver in the sunroom of their home overlooking Lake Washington to the east. The clouds had gone from partly cloudy last night to solid overcast this morning. By this afternoon, the weather report said it would be raining.
Cecilia had insisted on weekly face-to-face meetings (which became somewhat redundant because she called every day anyway), but she was the client, so we went. The meeting days varied based on Cecilia’s schedule, and this week it had fallen on a weekend. Saturday mornings would not normally be my first choice—I’d rather be out training for the race, but business takes precedence, and Cecilia wanted to make it a breakfast meeting today. Since the early morning training run was already blown, we’d scheduled a team meeting at the office right after this one. Which means my training run would have to wait until this afternoon. In the rain, no doubt. Oh well, there’re worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon. At least we were getting paid.
I was working on a melon slice. “Could be that he’s guilty. We’ll know more when he turns himself in tonight. I’m sure the police will question him extensiv
ely.”
“If he turns himself in,” Toni added.
I glanced at her. “She’s a nonbeliever.”
Oliver rubbed his chin. “I never paid him much attention, I suppose. No reason to. I never suspected that he, or the girl, was up to anything nefarious.”
Toni smiled. “People involved with drugs—especially people selling drugs—they’re usually pretty circumspect.”
Oliver nodded. “I suppose so. I guess I was easily fooled.”
Cecilia looked at Oliver with a mildly disgusted look, as if it were completely expected that he was capable of being fooled. Then she turned to me. “Well, we won’t be so easily fooled now, will we?” Suddenly, she froze, fork suspended in midair. She turned to me. “Let me ask you, when they bring this man in, will you be present during his questioning?”
I nodded. “Maybe. They asked us to be there tonight. I imagine they’ll probably let us watch the questioning.”
“Watch? Watching simply won’t do. The only reason the incompetent fools are even talking to this man after three bloody months is because you uncovered him. I’m going to call Ron Bergstrom and insist that you be allowed to take part in the questioning. I want you to ask him point-blank why he killed Sophie!” She shook her head. “Bloody idiots. Not a single lead in ninety days, and the two of you are on the job, what, a week? And already, you have a suspect? And I’m to be expected to simply allow you to be kept on the sidelines, at their convenience, and watch?” She slapped her fork on the table. “Bloody nonsense!”
We survived the meeting with Cecilia and by 9:30 a.m., we were in our conference room with Doc and Richard waiting for Kenny to show up so that we could start the briefing.
“Anybody heard from Kenny?” I asked.
Richard shook his head. “Not me.”
Doc finished his yawn. “Me neither. I saw him last night at the gym. He was coming in when I was leaving. But that was it.”
I nodded. It wasn’t like Kenny to be late. In fact, he was usually a half hour early for our meetings. “Well, if he doesn’t show up in a minute or two, I’ll call his cell. Meanwhile, what’d you guys find out about this Margolian guy?”
Mona Lisa Eyes (Danny Logan Mystery #4) Page 19
